A Lot of Night Music

As one might have predicted, I landed at JFK, dropped my suitcase at Brady's, and the two of us went directly to Splash for Musical Monday. We made it in time for two-for-ones and managed to catch four Patti numbers in the three hours we were there. It is times like this when I miss New York in an almost physical way.

The whole week was kind of fun and nostalgia-inducing like that, though. The next day, I went to Amy's for breakfast and went down to my old office to say hey to everybody, went uptown to Soho for a meeting and got the casing on my MacBook replaced at the Apple Store, had the veggie press at Grey Dog, and then saw A Little Night Music with my brother. (It was awesome, and I finally understand why people like Bernadette Peters. Since junior high I've been like, I don't understand, she sounds like a child, this makes no sense to me. And I saw her in Gypsy as Mama Rose, which was equally weird to me, but then I saw this production and was like, oh, it all makes sense now. Elaine Stritch was awesome, obviously, but struggled through a couple of parts - including forgetting the lyrics to Liaisons and having someone yell a prompt from off stage - and it was kind of hard to watch. I maintain that this only heightened the poignancy of the role. When in doubt, reach for Brecht.) And then we went for drinks at Eatery and caught up, which was lovely, because it always is.

The next day I got that ridiculous vegan oatmeal date scone at Whole Foods that I eat when I feel good enough about my body that I give myself permission to consume a small cake of oil, went into work again because I wasn't really sure what else to do, then went up to Columbia and poked around the law school before going to the Hungarian Pastry Shop to catch up with Abby, and then for beer at Valhalla with a friend of mine, and then for gay Thai with Brady, and then Bartini with Brady and Lee et al., where Bebe was performing and I got myself some cheek kisses and skinny vodka and Red Bull cocktails that I felt filthy ordering but were actually pretty good. And now I'm rocketing toward DC to spend time with David, in a replay of pretty much every weekend from mid 2009 to mid 2010. Somehow, during all of this, I managed to read Lefebvre's The Sociology of Marx, Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, and a few essays on development anthropology, so it's not even like I was a total slacker between the rediscovery of my favorite pastries and the singing off-key in bars.

I can't decide whether all of this means that I have to move back to New York in the fall or if it means that I have to perpetually be on the brink of moving to New York. It seems like a win-win.